When diagnosing or testing a new system or when configuring firmware on a new motherboard for a computing system, it is desirable to transfer data between the computing system under test and a remote computing system. In the past, this has been accomplished by using a serial port at both of a local computing system under test and the remote computing system. Data tables are transferred serially between the systems.
What is needed is an ability to provide console redirection so that the remote computing system emulates video and input at the local computing system under test. In other words, the video data for a screen shot and a key press for the local computing system are redirected and controlled from the remote computing system.
A problem arises when doing this at the BIOS or DOS program level because, when communicating with the firmware, the complexity and resulting implementation code size dictates the use of the UDP protocol. The remote computing system, on the other hand, communicates using the TCP protocol. Therefore in this exemplary situation, there is a need to bridge between the UDP and the TCP protocols to be able to move the video and key press data between the remote computing system and the local computing system under test.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.